“I learned to pick up each piece, one at a time, from my pile of potential matches and try to fit it from any angle into the socket, then discard it and move on. Each failure is meaningless. It's not me, it's the pieces, and I have to, absolutely must, try each and every piece every possible way until I find one that fits. They aren't failures, they're steps, small bits of progress.”

“It's taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.”

“When you could discern a real threat from everything else, it was called caution. When you couldn't, it was called paranoia....You cannot separate paranoia from knowledge. The more you know, the more possibilities you see. The more possibilities you see, the more possibilities someone else sees. The more "someones" there are, the more "they" there are. It's a matter of simple math before you realize that They might not like you.”

“i learned that predators don't intentionally choose the weak or old or sick. they kill what they can, which means the slow members of the pack. thus, they strengthen the very gene pool they're feeding from. the threshold for what is weak, old or sick gets raised, and the strength, speed and instincts of new generations of hunters grow. a beautiful, self-perpetuating system where evolution is the antithesis of entropy.”

“From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.”

“Imagine the one god himself has reversed his clock and reversed your regrets. Imagine knowing the bone-deep truth that whatever impossibility would make you truly happy has been granted. Imagine knowing you can once again hold your lost lover or your newborn child. Imagine what you feel during those first seconds of knowing. Now, imagine those first seconds last for days on end. ....Like I said, I'm a chemist. It's all coming back to me.p62”

“If I'm still conscious to face the consequences of my actions, then at the very least I will know that my actions were real, thay they indeed had consequences, though my lone life will amount to less than a single click of static in the symphony of the big bang. If my actions were real, then so were my memories, and if those were real, the things I've done have allowed me to see God and I0m not afraid of following my life down that eight-second black rabbit hole.”